The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

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Monday, January 7, 2019

Financial institutions moving to shut foes of jihad terror out of the financial system altogether - Robert Spencer

​by Robert Spencer

Hat tip: Dr. Jean-Charles Bensoussan

"Abandon free speech or lose your ability to process payments". Has it come to this?

Oppose jihad? Then starve.

This is not hysterical. It’s coming. In some ways, it is already
here. It has started with me, but it won’t end with me. Read on. And
donate to Jihad Watch, a 501c3 organization, here, and get the book The History of Jihadhere,
while you still can. It is not at all outside the realm of possibility
that you may not be able to do either in the very near future.

It is the most totalitarian form of blacklisting: not
just to be prevented from speaking on a university campus, or to be
kicked off social media, but to be shut out of the entire financial
system. That is the terrifying new threat to freedom that western
societies must now contend with.Financial blacklisting doesn’t just rob you of a chance to spread
your message: it robs you of your ability to do business, your
livelihood, your very means of functioning in a capitalist society.
Thanks to the encroachment of progressive ideology into the financial
industry — including major credit card companies like Visa, Discover,
and Mastercard — it has now become a reality.I first wrote about the rise of financial blacklisting in July,
in a column for Breitbart News in which I highlighted the growing
tendency of online financial platforms — as well as Visa and MasterCard —
to deny service to customers for political reasons. I was surprised to
receive a strongly worded comment from the liberal Electronic Frontier
Foundation (EFF), who bluntly warned that banks and credit card companies had become “de facto internet censors.” That even liberal groups had raised the alarm signaled the seriousness of the problem.Since then, financial blacklisting has only gotten worse. In August, Mastercard and Discover deplatformed conservative and Islam critic Robert Spencer. In the same month, Visa and Mastercard
ceased service to David Horowitz. While credit card processing service
to Horowitz was eventually restored, Spencer remains financially
blacklisted.Crowdfunding platforms like Patreon, which allow online content
creators to collect donations from their supporters, are frequently cast
as the primary villains in financial blacklisting. Patreon’s recent ban
of YouTuber Carl Benjamin, better known by his moniker Sargon of Akkad,
triggered a crisis for the platform.
Both donors and creators — including prominent atheist Sam Harris —
quit the platform in protest, while Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin
pledged to create an alternative platform that is pro-free speech.But Patreon and other crowdfunding platforms are not the real
villains. They are dependent on the whims of the credit card companies,
something that was already apparent in August when Mastercard forced
them to withdraw service from Robert Spencer. We now know that the
credit card companies were also a factor in Patreon’s decision to boot
Benjamin.YouTuber and Patreon creator Matt Christiansen recently released a transcript
of his conversation with Jacqueline Hart of Patreon about Benjamin’s
ban. Hart frankly admits that the sensibilities of credit card companies
play a key role in Patreon’s decisions.Here’s an excerpt of that transcript (emphasis ours):

JACQUELINE: The problem is is Patreon takes
payments. And while we are obviously supportive of the first amendment,
there are other things that we have to consider. Our mission is to fund
the creative class. In order to accomplish that mission we have to
build a community of creators that are comfortable sharing a platform,
and if we allow certain types of speech that some people would call free
speech, then only creators that use Patreon that don’t mind their
branding associated with that kind of speech would be those who use
Patreon and we fail at our mission. But secondly as a membership
platform, payment processing is one of the core value propositions that
we have. Payment processing depends on our ability to use the global payment network, and they have rules for what they will process.MATT: Are you telling me that this was Patreon’s decision then, or someone pressured you into this?JACQUELINE: No – this was entirely Patreon’s decision.MATT: Well then I don’t understand passing the buck off to somebody else.JACQUELINE: No, I’m not passing the buck off. The thing is
we have guidelines, but I’m trying to explain, #1 it is our mission to
fund the creative class and obviously some people may not want to be associated. MATT: Well if it’s your mission, then payment processors are irrelevant. It’s your mission. That’s what you’re pursuing.JACQUELINE: We’re not visa and mastercard ourselves – we can’t just make the rules. That’s what I’m saying – there is an extra layer there.

This “extra layer” places platforms like Patreon in an impossible
position: abandon free speech or lose your ability to process payments.
That’s also why so many free-speech alternatives to Patreon have failed:
FreeStartr, Hatreon, MakerSupport, and SubscribeStar all tried to offer
a more open platform, and were promptly dumped by the credit card
companies. All are unable to do business.This exposes the emptiness of establishment conservative arguments
about the free market. Those who oppose Silicon Valley censorship aren’t
allowed to just build their own alternative platforms. They must build
their own global payment processing infrastructure to have any hope of
restoring free speech online.That, or they must find a way to stop Visa, Mastercard and Discover
from taking advice from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)
and Color of Change. The former was allegedly responsible for the
blacklisting of Robert Spencer, while the latter claims to have removed 158 funding sources
from “white supremacist sites” — although as the group won’t list what
those sites are, we don’t know if they really are “white supremacist.”
The far left typically includes regular Trump supporters under the
label….

Robert SpencerSource: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2019/01/financial-institutions-moving-to-shut-foes-of-jihad-terror-out-of-the-financial-system-altogether Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter